Maps

March 12, 2011

If you've been wondering where Google is placing its marker for the future then Google's head of mobile and geolocation Marissa Mayer made it clear that the future is 'here'.

"The mobile phone acts as a cursor to connect the digital and physical,” Mayer said as she ran through some of Google’s location and mobile products and strategies. The new Maps uses vectors to render the map image because it takes up 1/100 of the size of the old tile system. They can be cached and can include 3D representations of buildings.

Next she showed the new Google Maps Navigation for Android which looks for routes around traffic jams. The idea being that the new update will lay the groundwork for predictive navigation apps in the future

She also shared data on a few of Google’s applications:

40% of all Google Maps usage is on mobile, and Google Maps for Mobile has 150 million users. The app’s turn-by-turn navigation feature processes 35 million miles per day. Also, the newly added route around traffic feature is saving users two years of time every day, which equates to a potential $250,000 in fuel savings per year.

Mayer looked ot the future mentioning augmented reality such as Layar "a digital layer on top of reality". But she says we can go further than that. "Contextual discovery is taking your location and a little context"

If you had a photo of a bird, how would you convey that bird to a search engine, other than typing something like "bird with a white head and black body"? In the future, you'll be able to use something like Google Goggles to just upload that snapshot as your query.

I pulled together some of the references and conversation from Twitter using Storify.

June 09, 2010

Love this Flickr set of the world's most geotagged cities. The images features all the major cities, and some smaller ones, with the locations coming from the public Flickr and Picasa search APIs. Top stuff.

March 16, 2009

The simplicity of mashing date with maps has seen them popping up all over the place recently leading to "Google Map fatigue" amonst many of us. This was a great session on how we can continue to be creative and innovate around map design. The panel looked at how we move beyond the simple pin-dropping style and demoed a compelling range of mapping innovations. Typically Michal Migurski from Stamen had all the best tricks up his sleeve.

One of the most interesting areas of discussion was around how we can deal with changes to location on maps over a period of time. Migurski showed off the London 2012 Olympic Map that he’s been working on. He dealt with the problem of mapping an area that will change dramatically due to construction by adding a timeline at the bottom. Dragging the timeline will show the stadium as it is being built with photos as and when they are added. Viewing the map in 2012 and and dragging the timeline back will show the stadium being 'unbuilt'.

There was also a really nice map on mysociety.org showing 20km round the BBC Television Centre. By adjusting the sliders you can see areas within varying travel times to work mashed with varying house prices then merged into zones in a way that you could never do with a load of pins. The dragging of the sliders and the merging of zones was a strangely pleasant experience when compared to many of the maps we see today.

I really liked the areyousafeatlanta.com iPhone app for it's simplicity. The app lets you see how safe you are at all times based on your location within the city. A quick tap displays a threat meter of your safety level
along with hyperlocal crime data broken down by type. Great for getting up to the minute crime data (updated dynamically) visualised in a really simple but effective way. What I also like about this, which wasn't really mentioned is that it mashed location and data without actually displaying it on anything that resembles a map. I'm sure that you can but threat meter is cool alternative.

If you want more examples of maps discussed in this session you can find them all tagged sxsw+neocartology on delicious.